Microsoft demonstrates Mango’s SkyDrive upgrades [Video]

Microsoft continues to plug away at Mango, the coming update to the Windows Phone 7 platform that, depending on who you ask, will either represent the coming of age party for the phone line, or merely another milestone on its trek to irrelevance.

Whatever the case, the Redmond software giant is happily crowing about the coming software bump, and is hoping to get the WP7 community excited about it in the process. In a new blog post today the company broke down and detailed what will be possible in Mango in regards to the company’s consumer cloud storage solution, SkyDrive:

Share photos stored on SkyDrive via email, text, or IM: SkyDrive lets you store thousands of pictures in the cloud. You can show them off to friends on your phone in the Pictures hub, and now you can share SkyDrive photos with anyone over email, text, or Messenger/Facebook.

Share your video on SkyDrive: With Mango, all the goodness you had with photos has been extended to videos. Once you’re finished shooting your video, you can caption it and share immediately on SkyDrive, and the upload will happen in the background while you move on to other things.

Browse your documents stored on SkyDrive: Windows Phone lets you view folders and files directly on your phone, so when you group things on SkyDrive, you know they’ll be available with the same folder structure on your phone.

See what’s been shared with you: More than 70% of the folders created on SkyDrive are shared with other people, which makes it all the more important to see everything shared with you on your phone. This pivot view will show you the complete list of documents shared with you, letting you open and edit in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. ‘

Search your SkyDrive documents: If you store a lot of stuff on SkyDrive, being able to do a quick search is important. In the Office hub, you can easily search across your SkyDrive for the document you need without having to wade through your folders and other files.

The company also prepared two videos that show off what should be possible with SkyDrive on WP7 once Mango lands:

In other news, Microsoft sent TNWmicrosoft, we assume in conjunction with this other PR push, numbers about SkyDrive as a whole that are worth sharing:

SkyDrive has over 100M users around the world

With over 2.2 Petabytes of data stored across all file types, including 250M documents

Synced across over 5M connected devices using Windows Live Mesh

We are not going to lie, we did not think that SkyDrive was anywhere near that popular. At the same time, who is going to buy a WP7 handset merely so that they can use SkyDrive more effectively? We are going to guess that the number is roughly zero. Then again, might it keep certain people in the WP7 fold, or perhaps convince them to tell their friends that the phones are worth using?

That could be. But we are slightly skeptical about the ability of marginal, very product-specific performance upgrades to move the needle much. If you don’t know what is coming in Mango, be sure and get caught up.